Grace and All the Noise, Noise, Noise, Noise

My favorite thing about the holidays is that they’re just positively soaked with grace. Even with all the noise. This is the time of year when we allow our world to just sort of shut down. Grace is, by definition, unmerited. You can’t earn the holidays–they’re just days on a calendar when everyone agrees to give everyone else a break. Grace has an easy kind of elegance. It’s holiday grace that allows things to open up, to slow down.

Thanksgiving is the first glimmer of that kind of broken-time grace. Everyone agrees that we’re all gonna just take a few days here. To cook and eat and watch some tv. Grace. Maybe we’ll drive a really long ways to do all of that with people we love. Maybe we’ll stay right where we are and do it with our friendily. Whoever we do it with, we’re definitely not going to bring up that fight we got into last summer about the thing. Grace. First rule is that we’re only going to use our phones for sharing pictures of holiday things. You know, like the food we’re eating, which is basically the same assortment of turkey and casseroles (that look very much like baby food on fancy china) as everyone else, but whatever. It’s also okay to text and call people you’re not with. You know, because you’re thinking of them. Just because you love them. Another example of holiday grace. So let’s all just put on a nice sweater and unplug. MMMkay? Because everything is okay! See? Look around. There’s food on the table. And there are good people around us who made this meal with their hands (or who, knowing they can’t cook or don’t want to, had the decency to call in a pie a few days ago. That’s grace, too). Our hearts are warm. At least for now, which is really all we have anyways.

So this year, our dinner was 30 strong. 4 turkeys. My mom and her 2 sisters still run things when it comes to the holidays, which is really sweet and fun to watch. I haven’t earned a ranking higher than to show up with my mac n cheese and take orders when it’s time to set the table. Our girls made the place cards for everyone–lots of charmingly misspelled words. At the end of the day, we all ate too much dessert after over-serving ourselves at dinner, which is to say, the meal was a raging success. Nathan set up a time-lapse of my family’s Thanksgiving plate-loading, which you can watch below.